Had she not longed for a little home
with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely,
bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom
she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to
atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the
exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she remembered
that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart
from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly;
and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it,
that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her,
and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent
ghost.
"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.
"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his
determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him. If she could
feel so much for a "casual," why not a little more feeling for him?
Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction
that they were full of feeling for him. They were sending a message, an
appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever heard
from her or seen in her face before.
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